A strong prompt strategy is the foundation of accurate AI visibility. The prompts you track shape everything Scrunch can show you, from how platforms describe your brand to which sources they pull from. This guide outlines the recommended workflow for building, organizing, and refining your prompts so your reporting aligns with real consumer behavior in AI search.
1. Start by choosing which AI platforms matter most
Your subscription counts Prompt Variants, which means every seed prompt is multiplied by the number of platforms it runs on. Because of this, we recommend thinking about your priority platforms before adding prompts.
At a minimum, we recommend tracking:
ChatGPT
Google AI Overviews
This keeps your prompt quota focused where it has the most impact. Depending on your plan, it may be better to expand coverage across questions rather than monitoring every platform.
You can always adjust platform selections in bulk later as your strategy evolves
2. Add the prompts you already know matter
Begin with the questions your customers actually ask. These are typically:
High-value branded questions
Core non-branded questions tied to your category
Comparison, evaluation, and problem-solving queries
Prompts your team uses in sales or support
Questions that show up in your SEO research or PPC queries
Add these directly in the Prompts tab. You can:
Add prompts individually
Paste in a list for bulk creation
Upload a CSV using our template with personas, tags, topics, and platforms
At this stage, the goal is coverage. Track what your team cares about today so Scrunch can surface how AI models represent you across the customer journey.
3. Organize prompts using key topics and personas
Prompts become far more useful when grouped.
Tags are flexible labels that help you organize prompts for internal workflows. Use them to group by campaigns, product lines, geographies, seasonal sets, or team ownership so you can slice your reporting in ways that match how your organization operates.
Key topics act as your high level themes. Think of them as your pillars for reporting. Use them to segment prompts into focus areas such as product, pricing, category, troubleshooting, onboarding, or brand comparisons.
Personas let you see how AI answers shift based on user intent. Because AI search is trending toward personalization, tying prompts to representative personas gives you cleaner, more realistic reporting.
Organize as you go. Assign tags, topics and personas as soon as prompts are added.
4. Convert your SEO keywords into AI prompts
Once your core prompts are set, consider mirroring your SEO strategy inside Scrunch.
Use the Convert SEO Keywords tool to take the terms you already track in organic search and automatically generate AI-friendly prompts. This does two things:
It aligns your SEO and AI search strategies
It expands your non-branded coverage with queries that already have proven search volume
This is one of the fastest ways to build a complete, high-quality prompt set.
5. Use generated prompts to fill strategic gaps
Depending on your subscription limits and prompt quota, you can expand coverage using the Generate prompts with AI feature.
Scrunch scans your brand context and produces candidate prompts in the same topic areas you care about. This is ideal for:
Mid-funnel questions your team may not think to write
Persona-specific angles
Topic variants that capture long tail phrasing
Competitive and comparison questions
We recommend using generated prompts to round out the set after your intentional prompts and SEO derived prompts are in place.
6. Layer in trends from AI Search Trends
AI Search Trends reveals the topics gaining traction across the industry. Use it to future-proof your coverage.
Workflow:
Open AI Search Trends
Click into a trending topic
Review real questions that consumers are asking
Add the relevant prompts to your prompt list directly from that page
This ensures your monitoring reflects what is happening in the market rather than only what your team predicts will matter.
AI Search Trends also helps you discover new categories, rising competitors, and seasonal demand shifts that you would not catch from SEO alone.
7. Validate your prompt strategy using AI Traffic and Agent Traffic data
After setting up your prompts, use Scrunch’s AI Referrals and Agent Traffic tabs to confirm your strategy matches real user behavior in AI.
AI Referrals shows which pages receive human visits from AI platforms.
Agent Traffic shows which pages AI crawlers retrieve most often.
Compare your top visited or most crawled URLs with your prompt list to confirm you are monitoring the right questions.
Identify gaps where high traffic pages do not have corresponding prompts.
Use model specific referral patterns to decide which AI platforms should be your highest priority for monitoring.
8. Maintain your prompt list over time
Your prompt strategy should evolve as AI search evolves.
We recommend the following maintenance rhythm:
Quarterly: Add new queries based on product launches, campaigns, or competitor moves
Monthly: Review AI Search Trends for new topics and add relevant prompts
Ongoing: Archive prompts that no longer matter or replace them with updated variants
You can bulk archive, export, or update platform selections at any time.
Best Practices
Include all stages of the customer journey
A complete prompt strategy includes:
Awareness questions
Comparison and evaluation
Product usage or troubleshooting
Pricing or availability
Brand reputation and alternatives
Scrunch reports become more accurate when coverage includes early and late funnel queries, not only brand terms.
Write prompts in natural consumer language
AI models interpret intent based on phrasing. For best results:
Use simple, plain language
Avoid marketing speak
Include the variations real users ask
Ask questions, not statements
Example:
Instead of “online banking benefits”, track “what are the best online banks for small business”.
Add geographic context when you need city or regional specificity
Scrunch can route prompts to a specific country through the Context tab. If you need more granular local results, append the location directly to the prompt. Adding phrases like “in New York,” “near Salt Lake City,” or “in the Bay Area” helps mimic how AI models use IP level signals to generate local answers. This gives you a more realistic view of how platforms respond to region specific queries for your customers.
Track both branded and non-branded variants
Non-branded questions tell you where AI places you relative to competitors.
Branded questions tell you how accurately AI describes you when you are directly asked for. Ideally, your website is the go-to source for answering questions about your brand, but you'll notice that's not always the case!
That's why a strong strategy includes both branded, and non-branded prompts.
Use tags for internal organization
Tags help your team segment prompts for workflows like:
Campaign tracking
Geography
Product lines
Seasonal sets
Team ownership (SEO, content, PR, paid search)
Tags do not affect reporting, so you can use them as flexible labels.
How this strategy connects to the rest of Scrunch
Citations use your prompt list to show where AI is pulling answers from
Insights highlights visibility gaps based on your tracked prompts
Agent Traffic shows which AI agents are accessing your pages
AI Referrals shows the human visits driven from AI platforms
Site Audit helps you validate that AI bots can retrieve the content intended to answer your prompts
AXP (for enterprise) ensures AI receives a fully optimized version of your site for the prompts you care about
Keep in mind: Your prompt strategy controls the lens through which all of this data becomes actionable!
Prompt FAQs
What are key topics used for?
They group prompts into logical themes for easier reporting and measurement.
What are personas used for?
We use personas to identify and suggest how different user types would ask questions in LLMs.
Can I convert SEO keywords into prompts?
Yes, use the Convert SEO Keywords tool to bulk generate prompts.
Can I change the LLMs attached to a prompt?
Yes, use the prompt menu to add or remove platforms at any time.
How do I edit prompts?
Prompts cannot be edited directly. Archive the old prompt and create a new one.
Can I bulk archive prompts?
Yes, organize by seed prompt, select the prompts you want to remove, and use the bulk archive tool.